The New York Times Magazine has a very long and very interesting article about the film "I'm Not There," an inventive look at the "lives" of Bob Dylan by director Todd Haynes.
The article by Robert Sullivan is quite good, and focuses mainly on the obstacles Haynes had to overcome to get his film made and released. Yet it also includes some Dylan arcana, including one bizarre little item that jumped out at me near the end of the article:
Later in the afternoon, Haynes finally got his hands on the master recording of "I’m Not There." Neil Young’s office had e-mailed it over. (Dylan’s people had accidentally given it to Young in 1968.)
What?
I've love to know what the hell that is all about. The song "I'm Not There," which has been talked about among Dylan fans for decades, used to be something that almost no one had heard. It was apparently recorded in the basement of Big Pink, with members of The Band, but was never released and barely circulated until the extensive bootleg multiple CD versions of The Basement Tapes began appearing in the 1990s.
In the 1980s I was working at a music magazine and I was able to borrow, from a famed author who had written extensively about Dylan, a reel-to-reel tape that another noted Dylan expert and author had given him circa 1970. On that tape was "I'm Not There." The tricky part at the height of the cassette era was finding a machine that could play the tape.
A friend and neighbor in Brooklyn had an old reel-to-reel machine, and so I sat in Jimmy Verona's apartment one night drinking beer and listening to the song over and over, trying to decipher the lyrics. One legendary aspect of the song, you must realize, is that some of the lyrics are not even words. Dylan never actually finished the song, so in parts he sang slurred syllables that took the place of unwritten lyrics.
The kicker was that I had no way to make a copy of the song, so after that one night of listening, I returned the borrowed tape and that was that. I'd heard it, I didn't grasp it all, and it was gone. It would be more than ten years before I'd hear the song again, on the 5-CD bootleg set The Genuine Basement Tapes. In the past decade, I've listened to the song now and then, and it's still dark and mysterious, the decipherable lyrics resolutely opaque even as the slurred syllables resonate with a strange tension. What's he saying? What's it mean? Who knows, but it's somehow a beautiful song.
And now the New York Times Magazine offhandedly drops this weird little bombshell that "Dylan's people" had "accidentally" given "the master recording" of the song to Neil Young in 1968.
That could possibly make sense, but it seems highly unlikely. Copies of songs from what would become known as The Basement Tapes had been distributed within the music business as demos in 1968. And a number of artists released versions of some of the songs, including "Too Much of Nothing," "I Shall Be Released," and "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere." But it seems really odd that a demo version of "I'm Not There," which has always been believed to be unfinished, would have been prepared as a demo.
And it's equally strange that it would have been given, even by accident, to Neil Young in 1968, at the time when he was exiting the band Buffalo Springfield and was concentrating on his own material. Perhaps it happened, but it sure seems odd.
Is there a completed version of "I'm Not There" that was provided, even by accident, as a demo? And if the song is finished, and it's not the version with Dylan at times slurring mysterious syllables instead of singing actual lyrics, doesn't that ruin the whole mystique of the song? And wouldn't the existence of a finished version of the song actually undermine the concept of using the song as the title of Hayne's film?
Finally, one more thing about this sounds bizarre for technical reasons. The magazine article mentions that Neil Young's office "e-mailed" the master recording. People e-mail MP3s all the time. Not long ago I even e-mailed an MP3 of "I'm Not There" to a friend. But a lossless version of a master recording, something of the quality that you'd want to use in a film, would be a very big file to e-mail. And since the original recording from the summer of 1967 would be on analog tape anyway, wouldn't the film company want the actual tape so they could make their own transfer to digital? This makes the story seem all the more peculiar.
And that brings to mind a possible explanation: it has been known for years that Neil Young has been preparing his own archival box set, so he must have assembled a studio where he could play vintage tapes and master them digitally. Perhaps Dylan's people, in recent times, have passed along some of Dylan's old master tapes so Neil's engineers could do the same mastering to them.
If that's the case, it could mean that Dylan may intend to officially release the entire Basement Tapes, as well as other unreleased material from the sixties, and that would be huge news to Dylan fans. And perhaps the writer of the magazine article was simply told the false story that "I'm Not There" was given to Neil Young in 1968 to obscure that scenario.
I'd love to know what the real story is with this mysterious "master recording" of "I'm Not There." And, as is often the case, it might just be one of those weird stories you read in the newspaper and you know it just makes no sense. They always remind me of a favorite Dylan line, from "Clothes Line Saga," coincidentally another Basement Tapes song: "It's just somethin' we're gonna have to forget."
Crossposted from:
Snaking the Drain